HDTV wreaks havoc on closed captioning

By CLINT SWETT
Sacramento Bee
Monday, May 07, 2007

For two months early this year, Janel Edmiston and her family enjoyed their new Panasonic high-definition TV, which occupies a big chunk of the family room wall in their Elk Grove, Calif. home.

But for Edmiston, who began losing her hearing at age 23, the pleasure was fleeting.

In March, she said, closed captioning that came via her cable box disappeared.

"It's not that I'm addicted to TV, but I was missing out on time with my family in the evenings," Edmiston said of losing the captioning feature. "I'd go into another room (to read or fold laundry) while they were watching TV. ... Without captions it's like they are speaking Russian."

Edmiston's problem is a familiar story to a growing number of the estimated 31 million hearing-impaired TV viewers nationwide.

As high-definition TV gains momentum in the United States, broadcasters, set-top box manufacturers and cable and satellite companies are struggling to provide closed captioning.

While most older analog sets provide captions with the touch of a remote control button or via a simple on-screen menu, it's more complicated to get closed captioning on the newest digital TVs that get their signal through cable and satellite boxes rather than antennas. That's because the signal is processed by the box and the caption settings must be matched to the resolution of the TV display.

For the deaf community, captioning is a serious issue.

"What would (a hearing person) do if (they) turned on the TV and the volume control wasn't working and there were no voices or sound accompanying the program?" asked Sheila Conlon Mentkowski, an official with the California Department of Rehabilitation in Sacramento, Calif. and chairwoman of the National Association of the Deaf's technology committee.

There appears to be plenty of blame to go around for the captioning troubles, said Larry Goldberg, director of media access at Boston public TV station WGBH and an expert on captioning.

"I'm getting reports all the time about closed-captioning problems," said Goldberg, who helped write many of the captioning regulations for the Federal Communications Commission.

"If there was one organization we could blame it would make it a lot easier. But there are at least a few different causes."

For instance, not all broadcasters properly encode their closed-caption data, even though there's a standard mandated by the FCC, Goldberg said.

In addition, not every channel provides digital closed captions 100 percent of the time. The FCC required that digital captioning be available by 2006, but granted some exemptions.

New networks have four years to implement HD captioning, and networks with revenue under $3 million a year also are exempt.

Some long-time broadcasters however, are saying their newly launched HD channels qualify as new networks, and claim the four-year exemption, wrote Ron Bibler, a deaf financial planner in Great Falls, Mont., and an activist on the issue.

He points to NBC's Universal HD channel, which he said often doesn't provide captioning while identical programming on its sister USA Network has the captions. After complaining to NBC, Bibler said, he received a letter from the network saying Universal HD expected closed captioning by the end of 2007. Universal executives could not be reached for comment.

In addition, most high-definition cable and satellite set-top boxes control the caption settings through often obscure and confusing menus.

"I learned that ... digital captioning options must be controlled from the cable box via a hidden menu that comes with no instructions," wrote Pamela Holmes, a deaf cable customer in Madison, Wis.

In an e-mail, Holmes said it took nearly 12 hours with installers, phone support and other resources to get her closed captioning operating.

Representatives of Motorola and Scientific Atlanta, the two major makers of set-top boxes, did not respond to requests for comment on the closed captioning problem.

Further complicating things, people are now discovering that if an HDTV set is hooked to the cable box through a connection called HDMI, captions won't be displayed at all.

All of this frustrates deaf viewers, who feel they are being short-changed by the industry.

"Deaf and hard of hearing people pay the same amount for their HDTV, cable or satellite hookups and therefore should be afforded to enjoy TV as our hearing peers," wrote Sheri Farinha, chief executive of the NorCal Center on Deafness in Sacramento. "We should not have to haggle with any of the companies to get the captioning to work and/or appear on the HDTV screens."

Even as the deaf community complains about the captioning problem, the issue appears to have escaped the notice of many in the broadcast industry.

Representatives of Comcast in Sacramento, the National Cable Television Association, the Society of Cable Television Engineers, and Cable Labs, a cable technology research consortium, all said they were unaware of any problem involving closed captions on HDTV.

"To the extent it's a problem, we wouldn't know about it," said Jason Oxman, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association.

At the FCC, spokesman Clyde Ensslin said his agency is aware of the issue and is "watching it closely." Still, the FCC has received only about 70 complaints regarding "accessibility issues" in the second and third quarters of 2006.

Mentkowski, of the National Association of the Deaf, isn't sure why more closed captioning complaints haven't been filed, given that online discussion groups for the deaf are filled with postings on the issue.

"We don't sit on our couches with a piece of paper and a pen to write down the date, time, name of the program that has not had captions or has garbled captions," she wrote in an e-mail. "We usually just surf to another channel."

Goldberg of WGBH said he's confident all the issues eventually will be resolved.

"It's a matter of time and a critical mass of complaints reaching the right people," he said. "But eventually all the powers that be will deal with it."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)